Do you have to be in every conversation?

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has a good post about how the conversation is leaving blogs and going to Twitter, FriendFeed and other services. More importantly, she touches on a big question: How do you keep up?

Perez then dutifully notes all the various services of services you can subscribe to keep current: Twitter Friends, Replies, Topics, Facebook updates and various flavors of FriendFeeds.

After reading this missive I was just hit with more questions. Among them:

• When do you have a conversation for real?
• When do you play with your kids?
• Is everyone so busy Twittering and tracking 140 character ramblings that you forget it's sunny outside?
• If you boiled down the comments on all of these services how many are truly valuable?
• What exactly are we striving to keep up with?
• What's wrong with the sound of silence?
• What's the threshold between "neat service" and "waste of my time?"
• Would a better filter be to just decline the latest newfangled Web 2.0 service and be a lackadaisical follower?